We are thrilled to be venturing on a new long-term co-publishing collaboration with Sming Sming Books, an artist-run publishing studio based in the Bay Area.

Through Sming Sming Books, each book is developed out of close collaboration with artists and writers, using different approaches to design, materials, and printing methods based on the author’s work and ideas. At its core, Sming Sming Books is committed to promoting critical discourse and advancing cultural equity through the format of publishing.

With shared aims of creating a sustainable and equitable model for supporting artists through publishing, Sming Sming Books and Candor Arts are establishing an ongoing partnership to produce artists books that drive both their missions. Candor Arts's high level of detail and craft in creating handmade books will be joined by Sming Sming Books's conceptual and experimental approach to design.

The first book produced under this partnership will be White Gaze by Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê, to be released in February 2018. White Gaze is a series of works by artist and filmmaker Michelle Dizon that uses an archive of National Geographic magazines to unearth a genealogy of racist visuality within imperialist narratives. The book includes accompanied text by Việt Lê, who uses Dizon’s work as a starting point for a poetic exploration of the legacies of war.

About White Gaze:

Artist and filmmaker Michelle Dizon works with an archive of National Geographic magazines to explore the mechanics of the "white gaze." Through a process of poetic subtraction, Dizon works with only the language on the original page to write a decolonial counterpoint to a way of imaging the world centered on the West. Her images lay the white gaze bare, unearth a genealogy of a racist visuality, and work in the gap between image and text to write against the grain of imperialist narratives. Artist and writer Việt Lê uses Dizon's images from White Gaze as a starting point for his poetic exploration of the legacies of war and imperialism. Lê's text performs a dual work, both contextualizing Dizon's images in the history of empire and unleashing a rhythmic play with language, both visually and aurally, to cut to the core of how meaning is produced. His text speaks to absence as much as presence with a story of war and empire told in fragments, phrases, words hanging on the page—an index of both the trauma and resistance experienced by those subjected to the violence of empire.

About the Authors:

Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, theorist, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. Born in the United States as part of the Philippine diaspora, Dizon’s life experience has been shaped by the politics of migration across the Pacific Rim. The violence of imperialism and the intimate spaces of resistance within globalization form central pivots in her work which take the form of multi-channel video installations, expanded cinema performances, essay films, photographs, discursive events, pedagogical platforms, and writing.

Dizon is the founder of at land’s edge, an experimental platform for visual research and catalyst for decolonial thought and action. She has taught courses on documentary, visuality, postcoloniality, globalization, war, feminism, and ecology at the California Institute of the Arts and served as co-chair and core faculty in the Visual Art program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She earned an MFA in Art with specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley. www.michelledizon.com

Lê received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine, where he has also taught Studio Art and Visual Culture courses. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (Department of American Studies & Ethnicity). www.vietle.net